


Lead Weights on Your Shoulders

by GettheSalt



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Depression, Doctor Lincoln, Gen, Inspired by the s03e01 sneak peek, Mentions of Jiaying and Gordon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 10:13:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4872880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GettheSalt/pseuds/GettheSalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lincoln hasn't been the same ever since that damn ship. <br/>Lincoln just wants to be left alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lead Weights on Your Shoulders

This life was the one that he was cut out for.

That was what Lincoln Campbell told himself every morning when he got up. He'd managed to finish school and start his residency – it wasn't so hard to do things like that when you weren't being coerced into helping brainwash innocent, confused people into believing their curses were gifts. He'd gotten himself his own apartment, and, even if it was small, just a bachelor pad, it was home. It was a good place to fall asleep and wake up, and that was all he needed it to be.

The nurses liked to joke that he was around the hospital more than them, but Lincoln didn't think they were actually joking all that much. He felt like he stayed at the hospital until someone forced him to leave. Some of the senior doctors had remarked that they remembered being his age, being so fresh and ready to help people. There was something so rewarding about it, they said. They said Lincoln would understand once he'd helped a few people get through some of the most difficult times in their lives.

Lincoln had gotten very good at smiling, laughing softly in a self-deprecating way, and nodding that off.

They had no idea. No one in his new life had the slightest damn clue, because the truth of his life up until a few months ago was not for the public's eye.

There were only a few people who knew what his life was, and what it had become.

He dreaded seeing them again. Seeing _her_ again.

Skye – Daisy, he had to remember that she'd taken on the name her parents had given her at birth, and left the name she'd chosen as an orphan behind. Even if he had requested that she leave him out of her life, and let him be, far away from where SHIELD could meddle, he had to remember that. Who knew when she might crop up. Lincoln had had the bad luck of having been caught by HYDRA, and then taken in by SHIELD. His blood was in both camps, and Lincoln knew well enough; even if Jiaying had been fanatical in her execution, SHIELD wasn't to be trusted with Inhumans. Neither was HYDRA.

It was, of course, the former that Lincoln couldn't speak against. Daisy wouldn't hear it. She understood, yes, that there were issues with the agency that she worked for, but she seemed to turn a blind eye to them. He didn't understand how she could, after everything she had seen. After she had known Lincoln to have seen and turned a blind eye to the things he knew Jiaying capable of.

He'd tried to talk to her, once, on one of his last nights around them, about that. She had tried to reason with him, had tried to explain. Coulson, she said, could never be like that. Coulson was a good man, and all he wanted to do was help and protect people.

Lincoln hadn't told her that those exact goals had been ones that Jiaying shared. Daisy wouldn't have wanted to hear it. And, by that point, he'd already said it three times. It was becoming exhausting to argue in circles with her.

She refused to see how terrible these things could be, and she refused to understand that no agency, certainly not SHIELD, should be given governance over “Gifteds” - their term, not hers, and certainly not his – when they were more inclined to fear those people than to foster long-term cooperation with them.

So, he'd left. He had found his apartment, and started his residency, and maybe he wasn't happy, but he was distracted. Day in and day out he was distracted enough to pretend, at least for a little while, that he was happy. That he didn't look in the mirror when he was at home and try to find some indication that he, too, was tainted by terrigen. That it was slowly but surely going to turn his powers – something he'd once thought to be a gift – into something terrible. Something that he could use to hurt dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

Thoughts like that would plague him through his routine before heading to the hospital. Sit in the foreground of his mind while he showered, and in the background while he rode the bus to the hospital, only vaguely distracted by the couples, and students, and children around him. It would sit like an ugly pair of crows on his shoulders while he washed up and changed into his scrubs. It only ever felt like it was removed when he was busy, when he was distracted, focused on his patients, moving from room to room, bed to bed, with single-minded determination.

To help people.

Like he'd thought he was doing all that time at Afterlife.

Some days – most days – he was sure he was depressed. It wouldn't have been surprising, after everything he had seen and gone through. The world as he'd known it had been turned upside down –  _twice_ – and every waking minute was a minute in which his powers could turn him into a danger, just like they once had when he had first come into them. Lincoln had thought that, after  _everything_ , he had come to terms with the ability that lived inside him, and was fueled by his existence, by the mere fact that he lived and breathed.

And, perhaps, he had.

Jiaying, and her war against SHIELD, had changed all of that. Her actions had shown him the truth of the reality that they lived in; any of them could turn to abusing their power if they were scared enough, if they had enough reason to, if they had people who they needed to protect.

Or if they felt threatened enough.

That was the problem with all the new Inhumans cropping up all over the place.

They were increasing in number, in explosive ways, ways that they never should have. They should have been able to go through terrigenesis the right way, with all the information in hand. Instead, what was happening was a world where anyone, at any time, could grow spikes, or fling a fireball, or bring down a building by sneezing.

It wouldn't be long before average humanity started to find issue with that, and it wouldn't be long before their extremely disjointed community was threatened again. Maybe, though, if they didn't form a community, that inevitability could be held off a little longer. Groups were more threatening than scattered individuals.

Scattered individuals who were scared, and confused, and needed someone to guide them.

Daisy could be that someone.

Lincoln didn't think he could ever do something like that. Not ever again. Maybe that was cowardly of him, and deep down in the dark places, he knew that. He was turning his back on people who needed him, but look at what had happened last time he'd been part of the effort to bring them together. Nothing good. Maybe he was a coward, but he couldn't be part of an action that brought pain, suffering and death down on people again.

He was a doctor, for Christ's sakes. It was the exact opposite of what he should be striving for.

Daisy hadn't come by the hospital for a long time. Maybe she had listened, the last time, when he'd asked her not to. Maybe she was going to stay away for good, now, and let him keep his head in the sand as long as he needed, so he could get past this.

“You finish your rounds, Lincoln?”

Lincoln paused a moment, sliding out of his thoughts, and registering what the other resident at the nurse station was saying to him. She was being friendly. Hospital banter. 

She was being part of his normal, human life.

Lincoln smiled. “I'm tryin'. Patient in 305's bit of a talker, I hear.” He gave her a little bit of a nod, and headed on his way.

It was annoying how those dark, damning thoughts could creep up on him between patients. He needed to work on that.

The curtain in room 305 was drawn, which wasn't surprising. The hallway door was left open, and the curtain afforded the patient some level of privacy while they waited to be seen.

If this patient was a talker, that might be a good thing. Lincoln could use the extra layer of distraction, after what had been weighing on his mind only minutes ago. Putting his hand on the curtain, he cleared his throat, readying an introduction, and pulled it aside.

Daisy was sitting on the bed. While the door shut with a quiet boom behind him, she took a breath, like she was going to speak and thought better of it, looking up just in time to miss his eyes as he turned away.

This patient was definitely a talker.

And Lincoln wouldn't be going home without a head full of dark thoughts today.

 


End file.
